CITY OF DARKNESS

It is interesting to note that, while it existed, the Walled City was almost universally shunned and avoided by the vast majority of Hong Kong’s population, and if it was spoken about at all it was always described, even by those who had never seen it (far less been there) as ‘a bad place’. And few Walled City residents would ever own up to living there.

In recent years all that has changed. More and more former residents will now talk about their time there, almost with pride, and young Hong Kongers especially are captivated by the many stories about the place, seeing it as an intriguing – even instructive – part of Hong Kong’s rich heritage perhaps, or like so many others just being caught up in the idea of a place of mystery where anything was possible.

Yu Wing Leung, better known as Yu-Yi, certainly falls into the latter camp. As a young child in the early 1980s he went to school near the Walled City, and even ventured into its alleys occasionally, though he confesses he remembers little of what he saw there. And he didn’t think of it much as he grew up to become a talented writer and illustrator of fantasy stories and ‘manga’ comics, usually involving incredibly dashing, heroic young men and either impossibly nubile or overly demure young girls.





As he described in an interview for this book: “My encounter with the Walled City can be described as amazing. I didn’t live near there, but I used to pass it on my way to school. I was quite interested in it, but I didn’t try to find out more. Then, when I was in Japan, I came across a book, the Japanese edition of City of Darkness, and I was fascinated by the photographs inside. After that I began to read stories about the Walled City and the more I read, the more I wanted to write about it – especially since the place hadn’t been written much about in Hong Kong. My thinking at that time was, if I was to publish my own book, I wanted it to be about to Hong Kong. I’ve always been interested by triad stories, too, reading a lot comics and watching a lot of movies about them. Since the Walled City is about triads, I wanted to see if I could combine both in my novel.”

Borrowing the title City of Darkness, the novel did fairly well, but it really made its mark when it was later converted by Yu-Yi into a weekly manga that eventually ran to 32 issues of 40 pages each. It proved an immediate hit, selling 20,000 copies a week, and Yu-Yi has gone on to produce an equally successful sequel since.

As can be seen by the pages included here, a good deal of the imagery, in the early editions especially, ‘borrowed’ heavily from the photographs he had seen in our edition of City of Darkness, but they have been reproduced so skillfully that both Greg and I take the view that imitation – when done this well at least – is the best form of flattery.